Blog: Leave & Absence

Form 5500 is the annual return/report for an employee benefit plan. It is one filing that serves three agencies at once: the Department of Labor (DOL), the IRS and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). It reports who the plan covers, what it holds, what came in and went out, who was paid to run it, and whether the plan met a list of compliance conditions during the year.

For most employers the form arrives as a draft from a recordkeeper or third-party administrator (TPA) ...

In most organizations nobody is hired as a leave administrator. The job lands on whoever handled the first FMLA request: an HR generalist, a benefits coordinator, sometimes a payroll specialist who noticed the deductions stopped. Over time that person becomes the one who knows how the 1,250-hour test works, which state program pays what, and why an employee on intermittent leave cannot be written up for an absence. At that point the organization depends on them, and their knowledge exists ...

For years, the federal tax treatment of state paid family and medical leave (PFML) programs was settled mostly by old revenue rulings written for state disability funds, plus whatever each state and each payroll vendor decided to do. That ended in January 2025, when Treasury and the IRS issued Revenue Ruling 2025-4. It answers, contribution by contribution and benefit by benefit, who includes what in income, what counts as wages for FICA and FUTA, and who has to report ...

Short-term disability and FMLA answer different questions. Short-term disability (STD) answers "will I be paid while I can't work?" FMLA answers "will my job and my health coverage still be there when I come back?" An employee recovering from surgery usually needs both answers, and the employer usually wants both programs to run on the same calendar.

They only do that if the employer makes them. STD approval from the insurer does not designate anything under FMLA, and FMLA ...

An employer can grant every day of leave an employee asks for and still violate the FMLA. The violation is in the paperwork: an eligibility notice that went out three weeks late, a designation notice that never went out at all, a PTO policy that was supposed to run concurrently but was never designated that way. The Department of Labor's regulations treat a failure to follow the notice rules as potential interference with FMLA rights, and the cost of getting them wrong is often a second ...

Every FMLA request starts with the same three questions, and the employer has five business days to answer them. Has this employee worked here at least 12 months? Did they work at least 1,250 hours in the 12 months before the leave starts? Do we have at least 50 employees within 75 miles of their worksite?

Stated that way, eligibility sounds like a lookup. In practice it is a payroll calculation with several traps: hours paid are not hours worked, rehires carry prior service, ...

An unlimited PTO policy sounds like it removes payroll from the time-off business entirely. No accrual rates, no balances, no carryover caps, no payout calculation when someone leaves. For the right workforce, and with the right wording, it does simplify a lot.

But "unlimited" does not take time off out of employment law. Final pay statutes, state paid sick leave laws, FMLA, state paid family leave programs and the FLSA salary basis rules all still apply, and several of them were ...

Most of what gets written about the Family and Medical Leave Act is aimed at employees: what it is, how to ask for it, whether you get paid. This guide is written for the other side of the desk. If you work in HR, payroll or benefits, or you own a business approaching 50 employees, your questions are different. Are we covered? Which of our people are eligible? What do we have to send, and by when? What happens to health insurance and the employee's job while they are out? What do we have to ...